Will Trump Win the Culture War?

Most of what Trump and his minions have to say I find boring and stupid to the extreme. But when he talks about taking America ‘back’ to the way things used to be, I actually find this statement somewhat interesting yet at the same time somewhat quixotic or both.
And the reason I say that is because increasingly, his verbal and managerial assaults on the whole issue of DEI, particularly the transgender issue, reminds me exactly of the way that the Hard Right used to talk about Communists back in the olden days.
By ‘olden days,’ of course I mean the days before Nixon went to China and then the Soviet Union collapsed.
All of a sudden, these two great enemies either stopped behaving like Communists or didn’t exist. But previous to those events, if you were identified as having any kind of sympathy or support for the doctrines of Lenin or Mao-Tse Tung, there was a good chance you might lose your job or at least find yourself being shunned by all your friends.
That was then, this is now. And now when I turn on my DirecTV, there’s a good chance I’ll find myself viewing an advertisement which shows an obviously gay couple picking out some new sheets for their bed or maybe being congratulated by a real estate salesman who just sold them a house.
Back in July 2005, the wife and I took some vacation time and drove across the Great Plains. The second or third day we found ourselves sitting outside of a coffee shop in…